Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

The authority exercised by these institutional representatives is based largely on symbolic power, and is accepted as legitimate by the population as a result of simple mutual consent, a tacit agreement to recognize the institutional conditions which confer authority on certain individuals ⁹; Arthur Redding calls this tacit agreement the “manufacture of consent” (4). David Hawkes, in a discussion of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1867), mentions other “obstacles to true perception” including customs and habits, education, received ideas and, most significantly to our argument, “authority” or “the giving up our assent to the common received opinions, either of our friends or party, neighbourhood or country” (Locke, 600–606;Hawkes discussion of empiricism 44). In other words, authority is not real in any objective sense, and when popular support for the fictitious base of authority erodes, it topples very quickly, exactly as it happens in Memoirs. Even the last resort of institutions of power, the recourse to violent, physical force, does not hold sway for long; the police and the army are largely absent in the novel. As we will see, the State no longer has a monopoly on the use of force, nor on the diffusion of “official” information, and groups have begun as well the pursuit of their own interests outside the domain of the State¹⁰. As the old system of authority crumbles into dust, the over­whelming majority of residents seek to reproduce it, more or less as it was before. They wish to reestablish the institutions which they recognize and which give them a part of their identity by association, through a politics of arbitrary closure which, at least temporarily, defines identity as a function of group membership, as Michael Keith and Steve Pile remind us: “These politics hermetically seal these boundaries, creating spaces of closure; on one side, ‘the goodies’ and on the other ‘the baddies’” (222). Throughout her work, Lessing regards the division into groups as the fundamental problem of society, given that groups always seem to form, develop and maintain themselves according to a logic of competition and even predation.